City-regional, participation-oriented landscape policy 'in the making'

2023-2027 (subproject within the DFG-funded research group New Suburbanity, project number 466529662).

There is a continuing demand for housing in Germany, especially in popular large cities. This results in pressure to create new housing, not only through internal development and gap fill, but also through new large housing estates on the outskirts of cities.

Already in the 1960s to 1980s, large housing estates were built in many places, which due to their mono-functional structure have in part developed into social problem neighbourhoods and are also sometimes judged negatively from the point of view of climate and environmental protection. Against the backdrop of these experiences, other, ostensibly better projects are now to be realised: dense, but green and integrated into the surrounding landscape; inclusive and based on comprehensive participatory planning approaches; functionally and socially mixed; climate-neutral and resource-saving; with short distances and environmentally friendly mobility options.

In the project applied for here, the focus is on the aspects of (a) the embedding of new large housing estates in urban-regional landscape structures and (b) inclusive, participation-oriented planning. The aim is to investigate which discursive structures and practices are used to construct and operationalise the corresponding attributions, but also to question and criticise them. In this way, the focus is on the social construction of city-regional landscapes, on powerful inclusions and exclusions as well as on political negotiation processes. It will analyse how the tensions between planning and building policies oriented towards growth and return on investment on the one hand and the concern for an environmentally friendly and participatory development of suburban landscapes on the other hand are dealt with.

The project is based on a broad understanding of landscape governance. The theoretical framing consists of poststructuralist discourse and governmentality theories in combination with praxeological approaches.

Multi-stage case studies will be conducted in Frankfurt a. M., Freiburg, Hamburg and Munich. In the first work package, which is an exploratory and discourse analysis, political planning documents and media reports – supplemented by individual and group interviews, site visits and initial observations – will be used to examine city-regional landscape and participation discourses with regard to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. Building on this, the second work package selects six planning episodes occurring at the time and examines them from a praxeological point of view. Here, ethnographic, participatory methods will be used. The third work package consists of theory building and analysis, whereas the fourth work package is dedicated to the researchers' self-reflection.